Comparison of the effectiveness of adult and peer models with EMR children

The effects of model similarity on the behavior of 30 EMR subjects were investigated. An age- and sex-matched peer-model group, an adult sex-matched model group, and a no-model control group were used. All groups were presented nine test items from the Leiter International Performance Scale. Retention was sampled by repeating the tasks without models in a second session a day later. A significant main effect (p less than .01) was found for modeling conditions. A Neuman Keul's procedure revealed that only the peer and control groups were significantly different (p less than .05) across both sessions. Examination for first-session results revealed significant differences between the peer- and adult-model groups and the peer and control groups (p less than .05). The findings indicated that EMR children respond differentially to peers and adults as models and that peer modeling could be a very effective method for teaching EMR children, particularly in a regular classroom.